Historically, multi-participant events such as multi-party conferences have been hosted using Public Switched Telephone Networks (PSTNs) and/or commercial wireless networks. Although such networks allow multiple participants to speak at once, they are unsatisfactory because they provide no means for visually identifying each participant in the event. More recently, teleconferencing systems that rely on Internet Protocol based networks have been introduced. Such systems, which enable two or more persons to speak to each other using the Internet, are often referred to as "Internet telephony."
Multi-participant events include audio conferences and on-line games. Such events typically rely on the conversion of analog speech to digitized speech. The digitized speech is routed to all other participants across a network using the Internet Protocol ("IP") and "voice over IP" or "VOIP" technologies. Accordingly, each participant to the multi-participant event has a client computer. When a participant speaks, the speech is digitized and broken down into packets that may be transferred to other participants using a protocol such as IP, transmission control protocol (TCP), or user datagram protocol (UDP). See, for example, Peterson & Davie, Computer Networks, 1996, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, Inc., San Francisco, Calif.
While prior art Internet telephony is adequate for limited purposes, such as a basic two-party conference call in which only one participant speaks at any given time, prior art telephony systems are unsatisfactory. First, they frequently do not permit multiple participants to speak at the same time without data loss. That is, if one participant speaks, the participant typically cannot hear what other people said while the participant was speaking. Second, prior art telephony does not adequately associate a visual identifier with each participant. Therefore, when a multi-participant event includes several participants, they have difficulty determining who is speaking. Some Internet telephony systems have attempted to remedy this deficiency by requiring (i) that only one speaker talk at any given time and/or by (ii) posting, on each client associated with a participant in the multi-participant event, the icon of the current speaker. However, such solutions to the problem in the art are unsatisfactory because effective multi-participant communication requires that their be an ability for multiple people to simultaneously speak. Therefore, the concept of waiting in line for the chance to speak is not a satisfactory solution to the problem in the art.
A third drawback with prior art systems is that they provide no mechanism for associating the characteristics of a participant with a visual identifier that is displayed on the client associated with each participant in the multi-participant event. Such characteristics could be, for example, a visual representation of how loudly a particular speaker is speaking relative to some historical base state associated with the participant. A fourth drawback of prior art Internet telephony systems is that they provide an unsatisfactory privilege hierarchy for dictating who may participate in a particular multi-participant event. For example, in typical prior art systems, there is no privilege hierarchy and any user, i.e. the public, may join the multi-participant event. Such multi-participant events can be designated as "public forums." While public forums serve a limited purpose, they suffer from the drawback that there is no protection against hecklers or otherwise disruptive participants in the event. To summarize this point, prior art systems are unsatisfactory because they do not provide a set of hierarchical privileges that are associated with a participant and that allow participants to designate events as private, public, or moderated. As used in this context, private events include conference calls in which the participants are preselected, typically by each other. Other users of a system may not join the event unless invited by one of the existing participants. Public events are those in which anyone can join and speak at any time. Moderated events may be public or private, but require that at least one participant be given enhanced privileges, such as the privilege to exclude particular participants, invite participants or grant and deny speaking privileges to participants.
What is needed in the art is an Internet telephony system and method that provides the tools necessary to conduct an effective multi-participant event. Such a system should not have limitations on the number of participants that may concurrently speak. Further, such a system should provide an adequate way of identifying the participants in the multi-participant event.